Interview with Dr. Irving Finkel

DR. IRVING FINKEL, Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum, is interviewed in Jewish Ideas Daily:

But for the Grace of Babylon
A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.

Interviewer: Elliot Jager

On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.

Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.

Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.

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Good interview. More on Dr. Finkel here, here, and here.